Treatment of patients with advanced cancers is generally by chemotherapy. However, for solid tumours, in particular, it is rarely curative and additional routes of therapy are required.
Recently progress in human immunobiotechnology has opened up the field of immunotherapy as a new approach to cancer treatment. Specific immunization against a target antigen has been achieved in some patients with a number of different anticancer vaccines, but improved long term responses are desirable.
Accordingly, there remains a need for improved therapy regimes.
As chemotherapy has a number of observed detrimental effects on the immune system, chemotherapy and immunotherapy are regarded as unrelated or, more commonly, antagonistic forms of therapy. This is because, most chemotherapies kill target cells by apoptosis and this mode of cell death has been regarded immunologically as either non-stimulatory or able to produce immune tolerance—a state where T cells can no longer respond to the presented antigen by mounting an immune response. In addition, a common side effect of chemotherapies is the induction of lymphopaenia i.e. a reduction in lymphocytes and this is assumed to be detrimental to any potential immune response.